What are your favorite stupid lines from books?

Cafe Society
1

In the most recent sucky book thread, CaseSensitive mentioned his (?) favorite line from a Thomas Covenant novel: “They were featureless and telic, like lambent gangrene. They looked horribly like children.”

Shortly after laughing myself to death and resurrecting, I ran across my own Stupid Book Line. It hails from the ST:TNG book* Boogeymen: “Wesley didn’t feel like such a gazebo if Picard also seemed to be afraid to touch anything.”

Let’s make a trend of this. What are your favorite stupid line that you’ve run across in your reading?

Yes, I realize I was letting myself in for some stupid writing in a TNG novel. What can I say, I’m on vacation and it’s brain candy.

2

From James Silke’s Death Dealer trilogy:
“[The mountains were strewn about the] land like the turds of some incontinent god.”

3

It’s from a ST:TNG book I read once kinda by accident: An away team meets up with some inhabitants of a mysterious space station. The inhabitants happen to be the remnants of the crew of a starship that had gone missing soome thirty years previously. Paraphrase:

Uhh, huh.

4

Douglas Adams - The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

It’s not particularly insightful, nor does it hold a great load of meaning. But it is so absurd and out of left field that it gives me the Rampaging Giggles. Even better in context.

5

There was a book called “Term Limits” by Vince Flynn that I had the…experience of reading, once. (It wasn’t Plan 9 bad, and it was fun enough, but it wasn’t really a “classic,” by a long shot, either) At one point, when trying to narrow down a list of suspects in a string of assassinations, from eyewitness descriptions and the killers’ modus operandi, they figure their suspect is a current or former member (likely the latter) of the U.S. special forces, who happens to be black.

So they decide to focus their investigation on, quote, “former black commandos.” I think they even repeat that a couple of times.

So, apparently, they’re looking for someone who used to be a black guy, but gave it up when he left the service. Quite a trick.

I never could figure out if that was an editing oversight, or if the author was being really clever and including ungrammatical dialogue on purpose, to add a vérité feel. (Then I couldn’t decide if I was rationalizing, or just being overly kind.)

6

Are you supposed to like this line?

One of the most quotable books I’ve read (apart from HHGTTG) is My Blue Heaven with these two exquisite gems:

My dear aunt effie was dressed in a white gown that made her look like nothing so much as an alp.

And

While I’m certain there are any number of heterosexual boys in New York who adore Sondheim, I was pretty sure this wasn’t one of them.

7

You’re talking about the context of finding out, two books later, why it thought that, right?

8

Thog’s Masterclass (still an ongoing feature of Dave Langford’s Ansible SF newsletter) deserves mention in this context …

Outside of Thog, I’ve never forgotten the guy in the “Doctor Who New Adventures” novel The Bodysnatchers who “stood out like a diamond on a plate of kippers”.

9

That, and the bit about the whale right before it. Poor whale.

10

In Augusten Burroughs’ Magical Thinking, there’s a chapter where he relates an incident with an opossum. He describes the opossum’s appearance thusly:

“It had a long nose, thin, like a Swedish man’s penis.”

11

Vladimir Harkonnen in House Atreides, one of the rank Dune prequels: “You nervous coward!” I wouldn’t have thought it possible for three words to be simultaneously a tautology and an oxymoron, but the writers somehow managed it.

12

From Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange

:wink:

Cartooniverse

13

From Isaac Asimov’s Foundation:

"If you ask me, the Galaxy is going to pot!"

14

Remember the old Nick Carter spy books? Just pick one and open it up at random. Watch out for the exclamation points!!